Daily Archives: January 5, 2015

I must confess I probably wouldn’t have gone to the Strathbogie Ranges, in Victoria, Australia, if I hadn’t been a conscript to a school camp – a late conscript.

Once I’d adjusted to the idea of five days in the wilderness with forty something Year 8 girls, I began to consider the possibilities – hiking, camping, abseiling and mountain biking in the outback, kayaking on a peaceful lake. It sounded better and better.

A week later, tramping along a rough bush track, breathing in the heady scent of eucalypts, with the cackle of a kookaburra ringing through the trees, swinging from a rope down the face of a giant boulder, paddling in a kayak through an avenue of semi-submerged ghost gums on a mirror-smooth lake and finally falling asleep under a star-studded night sky, I thanked mylucky stars that I hadn’t missed it.